


His Wings Are Clipped and His Feet Are Tied

by alexavindr (orphan_account)



Series: Caged Bird [4]
Category: Captain America - (Movies), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom
Genre: Angst, BAMF Bucky Barnes, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Hydra (Marvel), JFK assassination, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-Canon, Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-X-Men: Days of Future Past, but since i'm a terrible writer YOU CAN'T TELL HAHA, lorge erik
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-08
Updated: 2016-02-08
Packaged: 2018-05-16 19:43:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5838457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/alexavindr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Despite his words, Charles does not know everything. Erik has left to pursue his revenge, even after Schmidt is dead. He realizes that there's more to be done. He assembles The Brotherhood, and begins to fight for mutant's rights. When he finds out that the President of the United States is a mutant and there's an assassination planned, he travels to Houston, Texas to stop it. </p><p>Little does he know that the person he's going up against is a familiar face.</p>
            </blockquote>





	His Wings Are Clipped and His Feet Are Tied

**Author's Note:**

> WARNINGS: Homophobia - kinda...I just thought I'd put it out there just in case - mild MILD dub-con (actually you're the judge of that), terrible action scenes, terrible dialogue, terrible everything, the author accidentally initiating a pity party

_I want you by my side. We're brothers, you and I...We want the same thing._

_I'm sorry my friend, but we do not._

Erik wakes up with a jolt, covered in sweat, eyes wild. His heart is threatening to beat out of his chest. The helmet lays on the bedside table, looming and cool to Erik's senses. His head echoes with the words of his past, the terrible words that broke his heart yet again.

Erik pulls his knees up to his chest to try and comfort him, to take up the least amount of space as possible and feel warmth from something, since there wasn't another body to do that for him. He hugs them to his body as a tear falls down his cheek.

Havana was almost seven months ago. It should be a distant blip in his memory and yet...and yet it's not, and he can't let it go, he can't get the anguished cry that Charles let out when the bullet pierced his body out of his ears, he can't erase the look of pure pain and agony in Charles' eyes from his mind. It's always _right there_ at the forefront of his senses, nagging at Erik like a petulant three-year old. Erik feels like collapsing in on himself and crumbling into nothingness. It's what he deserves, he knows that much.

Erik remembers where he is, and who he is now, and he straightens. He lets out a growl of shame. _You're Magneto,_ he hisses to himself. _Pull yourself together._

He gets out of bed and pulls on a white t-shirt over his bare chest, letting out a huff of annoyed breath before he decides to leave the helmet where it is. Emma should be asleep, anyway, and Charles might even be a welcome presence at this point. He shakes his head. Charles is too painful a memory to think about right now. Even his other good memories are tainted with his presence, and it's all Erik's fault.

The base they have settled is in rural Maryland, but they can transport away from there quickly thanks to Azazel, which is what Erik found the red-skinned teleporter's name to be. He doesn't talk much at all, besides from gruff 'yes's' and 'no's'. Erik rather likes that, but a small part of him wishes that he could know his story, know if Schmidt was as big a part of his life as Erik's. He wonders that about all of them, except for Raven and Angel. He wonders if there are more of him, more of him in different variations. The thought scares him.

He walks barefoot down the hall of the farmhouse, the walls paneled with old oak. There is almost no metal in the ancient structure, and that annoys Erik, but it's the best they have. Or, rather, what everyone else seems to want. As the leader Erik knows he should assert some dominance but Raven is attached to it now. Every time she stops him from moving to a more metal-abundant base he has to remind himself that she's one of the most useful team members he has, and he can't drop her back off at the Xavier mansion. He doubts that she would want to, anyway. And if he tried to do that, he isn't sure that he'd be able to leave either.

Damn Charles. Damn him to Hell.

Erik walks into the kitchen - it's a one-story house - and sees Raven staring intently at a glass of milk in her hands. She's blue, has been for months now, and Erik's glad she's finally come to terms with her biggest insecurity. He leans against the wall.

"Can't sleep?" he asks, his voice more even than his thoughts.

"No." she responds. "You?"

"No."

Mystique nods, looking down at her milk like it had wronged her. Erik knows the feeling.

"Do you ever wonder if you...if we, did the right thing?" she says softly. "Leaving, I mean?"

"Y-es," he replies slowly. "We're freeing - "

"No, not to...to the _mutant kind,"_ Raven spits, her expression turning sour. Erik raises an eyebrow. "To the team. To everyone. Should we have left?"

Erik sighs and closes his eyes. If they're both thinking the same thing, then something must be wrong. _Had_ they made the right decision? Was leaving the answer to their problems? Or was there another solution out there that they just haven't seen?

"I don't know," he says truthfully. "Sometimes I really don't know."

Raven's jaw clenches before she takes a gulp of milk, wiping the remains from her lip. She looks at him, fear in her yellow eyes.

"Me neither." she whispers, and Erik sees the insecure girl who never wanted to reveal her true self, who always kept some layer of clothes on just in case she had to revert to true form. "God, Erik, what if - "

"We weren't who we really _are_ back there. Here, we're free. We're ourselves. Us in our truest forms." assures Erik, stepping quickly into the chair adjacent Raven's and taking her hand.

"Oh, really?" Mystique snorts. "Is _Magneto_ your truest form?" Erik pauses, then releases her hand. She makes an amused noise. "That's what I was afraid of."

"Of what?" Erik asks. "Me being _weak?_ Well, I can assure you - "

"Of hypocrisy," she corrects. "You keep pushing us, saying _be yourself be yourself,_ but then, in the end, you have no idea who the hell you really are."

"Mystique - "

 _"Erik,"_ Raven hisses lowly. Her teeth are stark white against the pigment of her skin. Erik almost flinches, but he catches himself. Sometimes he can forget how menacing Raven can really be. "For months now I've been following you, near blindly, accepting your ways and what you tell me to do, I do. I'm just realizing now that you have no idea what you're doing."

"Well maybe if you stopped _mourning_ and focused on what is supposed to be done, then we'd get somewhere!" Erik growls, his voice rising angrily.

"Mourning? _Mourning?_ You act as if _I_ was the one who shot my brother in the back!" she protests, volume increasing steadily.

"Don't you _dare - "_

"I know what you had! I know what you felt! And after all he'd given you, you throw it away for the _fucking mutant kind!"_ Raven shouts, standing up from the table, the chair screeching across the tiles. Erik shoots up too, his height giving him an advantage, but not by much. She's shaking visibly.

"You have no _idea_ what I felt!" Erik replies just as loud, if not more so.

"I have no idea? I have no _idea?_ I lived with him for twenty years, how could I not know?" she yells, jabbing her scaly finger into his chest. Erik snarls. "You say be yourself. Your true self. Fucking hypocrite." Raven lowers her voice to a menacing whisper, making Erik shiver. "No more hiding, huh? You scared to show  _your_ true self, _gay boy?"_

Erik feels the breath getting knocked from his chest like someone has punched him. Essentially, Raven has. The accusation - true as it is - has left Erik speechless, and while he's realizing that it's not that far of a stretch that Raven knows what Erik and Charles had had, he's still surprised. Stunned, more like.

He'd tried to hide it, with the helmet and cold indifference to almost everything, he'd been taught that it was a sin, that it was filthy to be homosexual, and even while he had been with Charles he still believed it, still believed that what they were doing was wrong.

Erik turns his head, eyes burning with shame, his fists clenching. He bites his lip and he feels his cheeks heat. _Leave get out run you can't be here anymore they won't accept you she'll tell everyone go while you can,_ his thoughts are a jumble of guilt and heavy sadness in his chest, and he realizes Charles is not there to comfort him through it. Everything around him has narrowed down to the burning of his cheeks, the stinging of tears in his eyes, the tightness of his throat as he tries to swallow. He lets out a shaky breath, trying not to alert Raven to the fact that her statement has hurt him as much as it has.

It doesn't work.

"Erik...I didn't mean...I just...," Raven stammers, reaching out to touch his shoulder. Erik jerks away, the back of his knee bumping the chair. She lets her hand curl into a fist, her attitude suddenly guilty. "Erik... **.** "

"I don't exactly have someone helping me, do I," he murmurs, "Someone to lead _me."_

Raven lets out a small noise. "I'm - I'm, I had no right to say that, I'm - "

"Don't. It's fine. I deserve it, it's a crime, right?" Erik swallows again, his throat feeling dry.

"Erik - "

"Get some sleep, Mystique," he orders gravelly. She looks at him apologetically, her yellow eyes full of unwanted sympathy and hurt.

"I'm sorry," she whispers before she walks out to go to her room. Erik stares down at the ground, his mouth crooked, before he sets Raven's unfinished glass of milk in the fridge and stalks off to bed himself.

 

Erik wakes up to familiar lips pressed insistently on his own, the feel of them soft and warm. At first he thinks he's back in the mansion, on one of the rare days where Charles gets up earlier than him, in which he'd wake him up in this exact same way. He moans softly and wraps his arm around his back, letting Charles take control of the kiss, his hands skirting gently up and down his left rib cage, knowing that it'll make Charles shiver. Charles has always been ticklish, and it's amusing to Erik that he can take him apart with his hands this way...

Charles doesn't shiver.

Erik opens his eyes.

He's in Maryland, in that dreaded farmhouse that has almost no metal to its name, and one of Charles' knees is pushing between Erik's legs, just an inch away from its destination. Charles is immobile. The helmet is on the side table next to case files of mutant research facilities. The helmet that Erik had used to block the telepath's mutation out.

This is Mystique, not her brother.

"Raven, no!" he yelps, shoving her off onto the other open side of the bed. Her version of Charles is clad only in his boxers, making Erik's heart ache with familiarity and want. This Charles bites his lip and sits up, one leg out and the other hugged to his chest, before Charles disappears and is replaced by blonde-Raven, her default. Erik scowls. "What is _wrong_ with you?"

"I...I just thought...What I said...I didn't mean it, I was just angry, and I know how much you must miss this, and...it's not like I don't know _how,"_ she stammers, her cheeks blushing. She's wearing a white tank-top and grey shorts. "For what it's worth - "

"It's worth nothing. You tried to _trick_ me, in my sleep no less! What were you thinking, if you were in the first place?" demands the metal-bender furiously. It's one thing for Raven to try to seduce him, but with Charles...it's something for which he won't easily forgive her for.

His heart pangs when he sees a tear roll down her cheek and onto her knee. Erik sighs and pulls her closer, letting her head fall onto his shoulder. Her hair tickles his neck.

"I just wanted to make up for what I said," Mystique whispers, her voice hoarse and thick with tears. "It's not just because I was insulting you, but...it was about him too. I'd known since we were teenagers that he went after both...genders, that is. I never could get over the fact that some nights he'd be the one kissing, and the other nights being kissed. You know?"

No. Erik doesn't know. But for Raven's sake, he nods and presses a kiss into her blonde hair.

"And - and, this one night, he comes home with all these h - hickeys and a black eye and I asked him what happened, and he just _smiled,_ and put it off on some stu - stupid excuse, and I that's when I vowed that he would never be with another man because he'd end up just getting h - hurt." she says. "I realize that was a stupid thing to say, but he really wasn't coming home looking like he'd gotten mugged. Ever since that night he had only flirted with and brought home women. I think it was because of that one that asshole fling.

"Anyway, you come along, and fucking hell, he's hooked. He never told me, but I could see it in the way he looked at you, talked to you, how he'd always act as if you were the best thing ever." Raven pauses to hiccup. Erik has no words. Of course, he knows Charles had felt that way, he had too, but to know the explicit details of it before Erik revealed his feelings is...painful, mostly. "You aren't, by the way. You're kind of a - an asshole."

"So I've been told," Erik mutters. Raven smiles brokenly.

"My p - point is that I was still angry at you for hurting him. But t - then I realized you didn't _want_ to, o - otherwise I don't think he'd be alive." she sniffs. "I'm sorry I outed you like that."

"You didn't out me to anyone," Erik argues, letting her wrap her arms around his chest. He isn't sure why he's letting her do this; he's not someone to let another person close for their own comfort. But it's Raven, one of his oldest friends. Granted everyone he'd met eight months ago were some of his oldest friends, because he hadn't had friends for more than twenty years, and hadn't had many before that either, other than Magda and his own family.

"I guess it was just surprising that I was right," Raven says, "I was just saying it to make you angrier. I know that's a bad idea, but...I didn't actually think it was the truth."

Erik pauses and looks down into his lap, biting the inside of his bottom lip. She was right; her saying it made it so much more real, and somehow horrifyingly past-tense, like some piece of history that Erik had moved on from, not one stellar memory floating around in his mind to comfort him. He sighs.

"Yes," he says quietly. "It was."

Raven nods.

"Do you miss him?" Raven asks after awhile.

"Of course," Erik replies. "Of course I do."

Raven nods again. "I do, too. And...do you really think we did the right thing?"

"There is no right thing," he answers this time, "there's only what you do in the moment."

 

Erik wishes Azazel isn't in charge of aerial supervision with Angel, otherwise he would love to have him just drop down and impale the man in black running away from him with his knife. Raven is keeping guard as a secret service agent. Janos had not been brought along - they didn't need hurricanes. Unfortunately Emma, his last resort, is occupied with JFK himself - an empath, the extent of his powers Erik doesn't know - and she isn't powerful enough to stop the man _and_ keep an eye on things from the President's point of view. Charles would - _stop,_ he hisses to himself, _focus._

God, what Erik would do for a fucking hurricane right now.

The man is hurtling towards JFK's car, which Erik can feel creeping steadily forwards. He would stop the assassin, but he wouldn't want to draw attention to himself just yet. So, he runs.

 _Would a knife -_ Erik thinks, the thought half-formed, before the man turns around with a clear gun - no metal, _dammit -_ pointed at Erik. Erik reaches out and suddenly finds that the potential killer's _entire left arm_ is made of metal. He makes the man's own appendage punch him in the jaw, then pin him to the ground.

Erik smirks, and wonders what there was to bind him with other than his arm. A more...persuading type of trap. His mask has tiny traces of aluminum in the lining to keep the lenses in place, Erik finds. Erik utilizes that and the goggles fly off. He can't pick up the man _yet,_ a floating man clad in black with a gun in his hand at a presidential event would be more than sounding an alarm of his presence. Erik removes the aluminum from the goggles, and thankfully there's enough to make a ring around the man's throat.

Erik steps slowly forwards.

"Who are you?" he growls lowly. "Who sent you?"

The man twists his neck away from Erik and tries to breathe as the cord around his diaphragm tightens. He makes a choked swallow, followed by a wet, quiet, gasp. Erik demagnetizes his hand from the ground and lifts him ever-so-slightly into the air, because if Erik's one thing, it's dramatic.

"Look at me," hisses the metal-bender. "Look at me and tell me who the hell you are."

The man closes his eyes, turns his head and spits in Erik's face before craning his neck away again. Erik makes a disgusted noise as he wipes his cheek with his glove.

"Alright," Erik whispers, his voice increasingly more dangerous. He uses the metal arm again - Gott, it's like the man is _begging_ for Erik to use it against him - make the man shoot himself in the foot. He cries out, and Erik feels a bolt of electricity run from his tailbone to his shoulder blades. _He recognizes that voice._

"Mmmmuh!" the man yells, muffled as Erik kneels down and squeezes the bleeding foot in his hand.

"Your _name,"_ Erik reiterates. "Give me your _name."_

He doesn't. Erik lowers him to the ground and presses the heel of his boot into the wound. A louder scream, but his eyes are still closed. Erik wants him to look him in the eye as Erik mutilates his body piece of piece. It's simply a better scare tactic.

"Open your eyes," he demands in a gravelly tone.

He finally does, and Erik accidentally lets him go in surprise.

Those eyes belong to Bucky Barnes, the only deceased Howling Commando that saved Erik when he was sixteen years old in rural Poland.

"Bucky?" he whispers, hoping that he can have the chance to explain who he is. The man doesn't seem to register the name. Erik's _sure_ it's him, he knows it, even though he was supposed to have been dead for more than twenty years. "Bucky Barnes?"  
  
Bucky stares at him, and for a moment Erik thinks he's gotten through - and then he shoots with the gun that Erik had forgotten was in his hand.  
  
Distantly, Erik hears Angel scream.

 

Erik watches as Angel's wings flutter to a stop more than one hundred feet in the air, Azazel's form rigid in shock. They're plummeting quickly, almost too quickly, and Erik almost makes the brash and imbecilic decision to chase after them, before with a puff of smoke they're both gone.

Erik turns back to Bucky.

"Buck - " he begins, but Bucky's not there. In Erik's moment of weakness, Bucky is already sprinting away, though remarkably slower due to the bullet embedded in his foot. Erik lets out a frustrated yell and starts after him, only to stop when he hears a gunshot. It's metal, he can feel it this time, the bullet is something he can control, and Erik swerves it to the right, because Bucky was probably left-handed because of his metal arm -

Hundreds of audible gasps and screams permeate the air. Bucky's gone.

Erik knows without looking that the assassin's tricked him, and that he's executed the president of the United States. The assassin, Bucky Barnes, the man who had saved him all those years ago, has tricked him.

It almost makes it harder to bear as he's shuttled into the Pentagon and shoved miles beneath the earth in nothing but sand, concrete and plastic.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long in comparison to the others, the blizzard took a week off of school and I was scurrying to keep up my grades. Thanks to my friend - you know who you are - who helped me through a huge bout of writer's block. I was terrible, but you didn't say anything about how I "yelled" at you through iMessage when we should've been sleeping. At least, not to me. Thanks, though, you were - _are_ \- awesome.

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry this took so long in comparison to the others, the blizzard took a week off of school and I was scurrying to keep up my grades. Thanks to my friend - you know who you are - who helped me through a huge bout of writer's block. I was terrible, but you didn't say anything about how I "yelled" at you through iMessage when we should've been sleeping. At least, not to me. Thanks, though, you were - _are_ \- awesome.


End file.
